Random Killer

by Hugh Pentecost

  “Colin’s right, of course,” Nora said. “We have nothing to relate to, no way to get started thinking the way you want us to, Mr. Chambrun.”

  “There isn’t time for us to get involved in any kind of free-associating group analysis,” Chambrun said. “You lave to go back two years. Some of you were at High Crest when Hal Carpenter was murdered, some of you weren’t.”

  “Miss Coyle and I were there,” Alvin Parker said.

  I’d forgotten to ask anyone how the ball to raise funds for the Parker Foundation had gone. Neatly, I guessed. And while it was going on, Ziegler-Davis was being choked to death in 604. All these people had been somewhere in the neighborhood when that was happening.

  “You can tell us more about High Crest than anyone else, Mr. Parker,” Chambrun said. “You understand how they operated, you saw their books, you circulated with he guests. Try to think of anything you can remember, no matter how far removed from the murder, that might touch Joanna Fraser or Geoffrey Hammond. Anything that might connect them in any way with High Crest, with Sharon Dain, with Hal Carpenter.”

  “Of course Joanna Fraser and Miss Coyle were there,” Parker said.

  “There may be something one of you has forgotten to tell because it didn’t seem important. Let us decide what has value and what hasn’t. You, too, Mr. Dobler—any conversation you ever had with Joanna Fraser that related to High Crest, or Sharon Dain, or Hal Carpenter. There were two years in which she must have talked any number of times about what happened at High Crest. The trial, the appeals, have been on television, radio, in the newspapers. Anything she ever said, no matter how casual and unimportant it seemed at the time, may be important now.”

  Bobby Bryan spoke for the Hammond forces. “Roy and I both knew at that time, two years ago, that Max Steiner had tried to talk Geoff into interviewing the Dain girl on television. It would have been done as a favor to Steiner —if it could have been done. Geoff wasn’t interested in murder cases, crime stories. He was a political animal. But he owed Steiner for past help on one of his shows, and he might have considered repaying that debt if he could have. He would have had to interview the girl before she went to trial. There just wasn’t a slot where he could fit her in.” He shrugged. “I can’t remember Geoff ever mentioning the case. He wasn’t involved, so he wasn’t interested. He may not even have known how the trial came out.”

  Roy Conklin limped a step or two toward us from the windows. “And one thing’s for sure,” he said. “Geoff Hammond wasn’t in High Crest at the time, or anywhere else in Colorado.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “I went through some files in my office after—after yesterday. The night Harold Carpenter was murdered, Geoff—and you, Bobby, in case you’ve forgotten—were in Geneva, Switzerland. You didn’t come back to this country until ten days later. Steiner didn’t get in touch with Geoff until a month after that.”

  “Of course,” Bobby said. “I had forgotten.”

  “And you, Mr. Conklin?” Chambrun said.

  “I, if it’s any of your business,” Conklin said, “was here in New York, minding the store, so to speak. I have other clients beside Geoff Hammond. Perhaps the Lieutenant would like to see my appointment book for that period of time—if I can find it. That was two years ago, for God sake!”

  Lieutenant Hardy didn’t look like a happy man. “I’m just a policeman,” he said, “trying to do a complicated job.” He sounded on the edge of anger. “I find your theories and Steiner’s fascinating, Pierre; who remembers what two years ago. It might get us some new theories if anyone remembers anything more interesting than anything we’ve got now. But there is a hell of a better way to get to the core of this thing.”

  “Tell us, Walter,” Chambrun said.

  “Who had breakfast with Geoffrey Hammond day before yesterday? Who had cocktails with Joanna Fraser before luncheon that same day? Unless we’re dealing with a gang of killers, which I doubt, it was the same person. You, Bryan, and you, Conklin, what about the breakfast guest? And you, Miss Coyle, and you, Dobler, what about the cocktail guest?”

  “I’ve already told you—” Bobby began.

  “I know what you’ve told me,” Hardy interrupted. “He didn’t tell you whom he’d invited for breakfast. But who could it have been? Conklin thought it was you, that you often breakfasted with Hammond.”

  “But not that day,” Bobby said. It had the flat ring of truth to it.

  “So think,” Hardy said. “You don’t invite a casual stranger to breakfast. It didn’t just happen by chance. It was arranged for. Hammond ordered breakfast for two from room service. What close friends might fit the picture? What business associates? Could it have been one of those Palestinian people he was about to interview?”

  “It couldn’t have been an unexpected, casual drop-in, Bryan,” Chambrun said. “Hammond was registered here in Conklin’s name, he was under cover, not circulating in the hotel. No one was supposed to know he was here. Right?”

  Bobby nodded.

  “So he must have invited someone,” Hardy said. “Who? Who would he be likely to invite.”

  “So help me, I haven’t the remotest idea,” Bobby said.

  Hardy turned to a glowering Roy Conklin. “You?” he said.

  “I told you, I’d assumed it was Bobby. That the killer came in after Bobby had left. But if it wasn’t Bobby—no notion,” Conklin said.

  Hardy looked to be near the end of his patience. He turned to Colin Dobler. “About Joanna Fraser’s cocktail companion?”

  Dobler answered in that slow way of his. “My relationship with Joanna was not altogether usual,” he said. “You could say it was periodic. We were divorced six years ago. That was when Joanna went into her liberation kick and a husband became something of an albatross.”

  “A what?” Hardy asked.

  “An albatross—hung around her neck. Old legend?” Dobler gave the detective a gentle smile. “In her way, in short. But we remained very good friends. Something more than good friends, I guess you’d say.” He glanced at Nora. “Miss Coyle has told you, or will if you ask her the right questions, that there were times when Joanna still needed me—shall we say for romantic reasons? On those occasions, if they took place here in her apartment, Miss Coyle, who had a room in it, was asked to—to go somewhere else. But day before yesterday, unfortunately, was not one of the times when my presence was required.”

  “Unfortunately?”

  “Because if I had been here Joanna would be alive,” Dobler said. “I have no idea who was here for cocktails, not the remotest. I was at work in my studio on Gramercy Park.”

  “Witness to that?” Hardy asked.

  “I don’t have an audience when I’m working, Lieutenant.”

  Hardy turned to Nora. He didn’t have to ask her the question.

  “As Colin has told you, we weren’t in one of Joanna’s romantic periods,” she said. “I spent the night before in my own room in her apartment. I had breakfast with her. At about eleven in the morning I went out to do some personal shopping for her. I came back a little after one and—and found her.”

  “She didn’t tell you someone was coming for cocktails?”

  “No. I think you might call that unusual if it was planned ahead of time. Just in passing she’d have said so-and-so is stopping by for drinks before lunch. But bear in mind, Lieutenant, she wasn’t in hiding like Mr. Hammond. She lived here. Hundreds of her friends knew that. Any one of them could have called her from the lobby and Joanna would have invited them up.”

  “We think this has to have been a man,” Hardy said.

  “Being a liberated woman doesn’t mean you don’t have men friends,” Nora said. “There wasn’t a room service order, so it couldn’t have been a stranger. She made the martinis herself.”

  “Best in the world,” Dobler said. “Made with loving care.”

  “All I’m saying is that her guest must have been unexpected, but a friend,” Nora said.

  �
�A deadly friend,” Chambrun said. “Were there other men who shared her romantic moments, in addition to Mr. Dobler, Nora?”

  Nora hesitated. “I can only tell you there was no one else I knew about. No one who came here. I was never asked to leave except when Colin was to be her guest. Her relationship with Colin was no secret to any of her friends.”

  “She could be a very private person,” Dobler said, “if she chose.”

  “Did you think there was another man or men?” Chambrun asked.

  Dobler gave him a gentle smile. “You’re wondering if I killed her in a fit of jealousy? But the Lieutenant doesn’t think you’re dealing with a gang of killers. Was I jealous of Hammond? Joanna didn’t like his public image, but she didn’t know him. I didn’t know him. If there was another man—and I say if—it surely wasn’t Hammond.”

  We sat or stood around the office, looking at each other. Like every road we traveled, this one, too, turned out to be a dead end.

  “So we go about it another way,” Hardy said. He focused on Chambrun. “The long, tedious way, not so imaginative as yours, Pierre. We question every bellhop, every elevator operator. We talk to every maid and housekeeper on Hammond’s floor and Joanna Fraser’s floor. We talk to the guests on those floors. Who did anyone see around eight o’clock on Hammond’s floor, after eleven on Joanna Fraser’s floor? It can take forever, but we may come up with two descriptions that fit the same person. There may be something distinctive about this crazy bastard that more than one person will remember. Meanwhile I urge you all to try to come up with some kind of guesses that could be an answer, no matter how farfetched.”

  He turned, beckoning to Jerry Dodd to follow him, and walked out of the office. It would be Jerry’s job to talk to dozens of people, who had probably seen nothing.

  I managed to convey to Nora that I’d join her in my place, but I stayed behind, as they all left, to get my instructions from Chambrun. He sat behind his desk, motionless, not answering the vague good-byes as a handful of frightened people left us.

  “I don’t envy them,” I said, trying to break the ice. “It must not be fun to know that this psycho is around somewhere and that you, without knowing why, may be next on his list.”

  Chambrun gave me that level stare of his that always seemed to be the prelude to telling me that I was not far removed from being an idiot.

  “Steiner made his point with me,” he said, flat and impersonal. “You get on this man’s list for some perfectly understandable reason. I think if there is someone else on it he knows.”

  “And doesn’t tell us?”

  “Can’t tell us because of what that would reveal about him,” Chambrun said. He reached, automatically, for his little cup of Turkish coffee. I almost shuddered when he lifted it to his lips. I can’t stand the taste of it myself. He put down the cup, looking at me as if I were a stranger.

  “We will, sooner or later, close in on this man—by luck, or by Hardy’s slow plodding. When we get near him, you, I, Jerry Dodd, or Hardy may find himself on that list.”

  “Me?” I said, startled.

  “He doesn’t know what you may have found out at High Crest.”

  “But nothing!” I protested.

  “Who knows, when it’s put together with something else we may find?” Chambrun said. “This man doesn’t mean to be caught, Mark. Whether he kills four times or a dozen can’t matter very much to him. He’s already accumulated more penalties than he can pay in a lifetime. No one who gets in his way is safe. So don’t feel too smugly superior to those people who just left us. Don’t be careless. Don’t turn your back on anyone. We’re all in the same boat as far as this monster is concerned.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  THERE IS A LINE I’ve heard Chambrun speak many times. We on the staff will go to him with some kind of problem, some kind of crisis. Let me say, parenthetically, that we didn’t face the kind of crisis we had that day very often. Chambrun will listen for just as long as it takes him to assimilate all the facts, and then he will put an end to the conversation by saying, “Let’s not forget we still have a hotel to run.”

  After his not so gentle warning to me, Chambrun had the Beaumont on his mind.

  “I want you to circulate, Mark,” he said. “Do what you can to calm down our special guests. Not everyone is in the same kind of danger that we are. Try to persuade the press people you know that we don’t need an army of self-appointed detectives trying to solve the case. Promise them facts when we have facts. Meanwhile get them to back off if you can.”

  “Not much hope of that,” I said.

  “Try being charming,” Chambrun said drily. “But above all, Mark, listen! Listen to any gossip, any wild notions anyone has. Most of all, listen to anything anyone on the staff has to say. They’re more likely to talk to you than to Hardy and his people. Who saw anyone on Hammond’s floor around breakfast time, on Joanna Fraser’s floor at lunchtime? It’s just possible we have a witness who doesn’t realize that he, or she, is a witness.”

  “Witness to what?” I asked.

  “Witness to the presence of the same person in both those places at those different times,” Chambrun said. “The breakfast guest at Hammond’s and the cocktail guest at Joanna Fraser’s has to have been the same person. Our man. If he was seen in those areas by different people, there may be a description that will come together into one picture.”

  “Isn’t that what Hardy and Jerry are working at?” I asked.

  He smiled, a tight little smile. “Sit a frightened maid down in front of a grim policeman and she’s likely to forget her own name,” he said. “You’re friends with the staff. They trust you. Listen to what they’re talking about.”

  If there is someone you love who is trying to hide the fact that she isn’t well, you will know it no matter what kind of a front she puts up. That’s how it was in the Beaumont that noontime. On the surface everything seemed to be running with its usual efficiency, staff people on their jobs where they should be, waiters and maître d’s at their posts, doormen and bellhops functioning as usual, Atterbury and his people at the front desk the usual smiling hosts. But under the surface I sensed the tensions that were there. There were more unfamiliar faces than I could ever remember seeing—cops, special guards, men and women I guessed were reporters who didn’t usually cover the Beaumont, and just plain rubberneckers hanging around waiting for something to happen.

  All I had to do to be swamped by both friends and strangers was to appear in the lobby. All there was to listen to were questions I couldn’t, or wouldn’t answer. I felt like some movie star being swarmed over by autograph hunters. I invented a kind of frozen smile that I gave to everyone.

  “I’m sorry—I can’t tell you anything till the police are ready to make a statement—I’m sorry—I’m afraid I have no comment to make on that.” Over and over.

  On the fringe of the crowd I saw my friend Dick Barrows, the crime reporter for the Times, giving me a sardonic look. I finally worked my way to where he was standing.

  “I thought you were my pal, Mark,” he said.

  “Things have happened so fast,” I said. “Did you know I’ve been to Colorado and back?”

  “I knew you were missing. Look, Mark, you can’t turn us off, you know.”

  “Orders from Chambrun and Hardy,” I said.

  “Where can I find Guido Maroni?” he asked.

  “Who the hell is Guido Maroni?”

  “Don’t play games with me, Mark. He’s the room service waiter who served Hammond’s breakfast the morning he was murdered.”

  I had never known the little Italian waiter’s full name.

  “What about him?” I asked.

  “Didn’t you know he hasn’t come to work the last two mornings?”

  I hadn’t known. I knew he’d been grilled by Hardy’s people that first day and had nothing to report. He’d brought the breakfast wagon, Hammond had told him where to leave it, and he’d come back two hours later and found Hammond stra
ngled.

  “They most likely gave him time off,” I said. “He was probably in shock after what he saw. I would have been.”

  “You saw, and you weren’t given time off,” Barrows said.

  “I’m not a hysterical waiter,” I said. “I didn’t have to serve meals to hotel guests with shaking hands.”

  “I want to talk to him,” Barrows said. “How do I find him?”

  And before I could interrupt he went on. “I’m working alone, Mark. But if you don’t tell me how to find Maroni, I’ll have the whole damned press corps looking for him.”

  “Why do you want him?”

  “I want the same information you want, maybe have already got. Who was the breakfast guest? Did Maroni see anyone in the hall, anywhere, who might have been?”

  This smart reporter was working the same beat we were. He could clutter us up badly if he called in the rest of the newshounds.

  “The personnel manager will have his address,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do for you.”

  Bill Wheaton, the PM, wasn’t as cooperative as I’d expected.

  “Hardy’s been asking for the same information,” he said. “I don’t think I can give it to you, Mark, without his permission. Certainly not for Dick Barrows.”

  “He’ll turn the place upside down if we shut him out,” I said.

  “Ask Hardy,” Bill said.

  “Guido was given time off?” I asked.

  Bill shook his head. “When he didn’t come in the next day, we just assumed he was too shaken up,” he said. “When he failed to show this morning, we called his home. Now this is just for you, Mark, not for anyone else. Not for Barrows, for sure.”

  I nodded.

  “We got Guido’s wife on the phone. She’s in a state. He’s been missing since the late afternoon of the murders. He went out to buy a newspaper. He wasn’t satisfied with what came over his TV set. He didn’t come back and there hasn’t been any word from him.”